The blog where expert practitioners share insights about the opportunuites and challenges of growing new cloud services

Service providers are striving to find new ways to monetize their infrastructure, and cloud computing is the biggest opportunity in decades. Yet, many are failing to exploit the cloud because their infrastructures are unable to orchestrate the elements required to deliver network resources, computing and storage ‘on demand’. Virtualized server environments are notoriously admin-heavy and the elements of the cloud platform – network, servers, firewalls etc. all need to be configured independently.

Cloud management software can help by managing all elements of a cloud platform; physical and virtual resources. It allows organizations to turn traditional hardware into a cloud platform by automating and streamlining the deployment while managing and provisioning those resources appropriately. This way, service providers get the most from their investments and exploit the growth opportunities of cloud services. The main benefits?

1. Quick time to delivery. Customers need flexibility that cannot be delivered rapidly without orchestrated, self-service provisioning. Today’s reality is that it is quicker and easier for a customer facing a surge in demand for a web application to hand over a credit card and change providers than to wait for their existing provider to ramp up capacity. Cloud management makes delivery instant, so your customers aren’t tempted away.

2. Flexibility isn’t all about on-demand provisioning. Be agile enough to provision exactly what the customer wants; CPU, memory, disk space or network/configuration and how the customer wants them allocated. The customer can control exactly what they need through self-service provisioning and avoid costly hardware situations by only paying for what they need, when they need it.

3. Expect ROI in days. Using cloud management software properly, offering an agile solution and rapid response that provisions the cloud platform will save money while introducing new revenue streams.

4. Cloud management provides granular visibility and control over which resources customers can actually use. By using metering, you can check how bandwidth, networks and disk I/O, for example, are being used. Before cloud management, there was no way of knowing how costs were mounting. Now you can charge customers for what they are using.

5. Competitive advantage through provisioning control.While not every service provider will want to offer self-service provisioning, the functionality is still important and cannot be offered without cloud management. Some companies will want to enforce ‘delegation control’ where some people can provision servers on-demand, while others still need to request it. This is a competitive advantage.

By utilizing cloud management, you will be able to keep pace with the technological landscape as they offer market differentiation as well as assuring revenue and new revenue streams through consultancy and new business service models.